David Tasma, a Polish Jew and survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, died in 1949 in the care of a British nurse, Cicely Saunders. The £500 he bequeathed to Saunders contributed to the founding of the St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham, an institution dedicated …

The Guardian began the year with a series of articles on innovation in global health. Devices such as “nanopatches” for pain free vaccinations that can be self administered are striking examples of technologies whose development and course to market can shed light on the role of design in possible futures of global health. As Peter Redfield has argued, …

Results were published this month from The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010 Study (GBD 2010). The most widely reporting findings are that the leading causes of death and disability worldwide are heart disease, stroke and respiratory diseases (see this table comparing 1990 and 2010). The authors of the study also stressed the importance …

An estimated 400,000 women around the world are living with breast implants manufactured by the now defunct company Poly Implant Prosthese (PIP) using industrial grade silicone not approved for medical use. The scandal has raised concerns about the regulation of medical devices in Europe and provoked debate about neoliberal approaches to the body. Anthropologyworks points out that establishing who is …

On July 20th the food crisis in the Horn of Africa was officially declared a famine. In David Keen’s 1994 book The Benefits of Famine he argues that famines are “naturalised” as “disasters”, and that this naturalisation obscures the processes which cause hunger, the “identifiable forces within the province of rational human control” Susan George wrote of in her 1974 …